I'm thinking of running PTU. For those of you out there, what would you want out of a pokemon tabletop? I'm looking specifically for major thematic elements of a long-term campaign, but any ideas will do. I'd like to have at least basic ideas for several different directions that I can offer as plot hooks to my players, to try to allow them freedom to pursue what they'd like to.
Pokemon Tabletop
Henry Ross
Camden Lewis
My ideas so far:
Gym challenge (with a few variants, but the same basic earn badges -> elite four challenge idea in each)
Team Rocket equivalent - as an option both to fight against or join up with. Not going to be strictly evil the way teams are often sold in the mainline games, but definitely not good guys, persay.
Religious Cult - Basically, treating the legendary pokemon more as gods or forces of nature, and having religion be an important aspect that pops up every now and again. I have some ideas for a "bad guy" cult, but not a whole lot for the more positive side of religious orders just yet.
International politics - I'm not gonna force this one on the players, but they still will occasionally run into border troubles or similar things. If they don't want to pursue it, those encounters can serve essentially as interesting filler.
New Pokemon - Pokemon Sage is a thing (although now a couple years without development), and there are already adaptations of those pokemon for the PTU system. I'm gonna throw in the occasional brand new pokemon so that they can experience the sense of discovery that the games hold.
Matthew Ward
Do your dreams involve rice fields? For that can be accommodated.
William Turner
Or really whatever, doesn't have to be rice fields.
Henry Jackson
I think someone mentioned a system for Mystery Dungeons a while ago, I don't have a PDF of it though.
Isaac Long
I think I've heard of that one. I don't need a system though, I'm looking more for the soft thematic elements as opposed to the hard mechanical ones.
Nolan Perez
make sure your players get different goals they can work towards, if everyone just wants to get gym badges you'll have more work to figure out how the leauge works in your game, either change the gyms to do "group challenges" or maybe have more than 8 gyms and they do little tournements every now and then where the winner gets to battle the gym leader as a sort of "bonus round" so that the players have to travel around more to get everyone a full set or something else to keep things interesting and maintain the flow of the game
Carson Wood
I like both of those ideas. I was already planning on more than 8 gyms, since it seems to me that in the real world the strict 8 gym setup seems too restrictive. I hadn't thought about group challenges though, which sounds like a good idea.
The other things I've considered for gyms are going dual-type, dropping type altogether for different themes, and doing non-battle challenges of a variety of sorts. I know the anime does at least a few non-battle challenges, so it seems reasonable to use that as inspiration.
Aiden Johnson
My planned set up takes the "How many badges do you have?" thing from Origins, where the team the leader uses is different if you have different badges, and thus can be tackled in any order
Jace Nelson
Part of the reason I'm running it is that the interactions like the one in pic related are essentially non-existent in the main franchise games. My players all will probably thrive on this to a degree.
That's a really great idea. I know I've wanted that in the main franchise games, so it makes sense to include it here.